1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to windowed computer user interfaces, and more particularly to a graphical interface that supports direct manipulation of objects.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In windowed computer user interfaces, the user may select objects to act upon. Selection is the act of marking a choice. The user may select 0, 1, or more objects. A user may also scroll the window, causing items to appear and disappear from direct view. During scrolling, a user's selection may no longer be immediately visible. Subsequent actions can affect selections, even though the selected objects are not visible.
If a user selects more than one object, it may not be possible to see all selections simultaneously. For example, in a large list of items it may not be possible to view simultaneously the first and last item of the list. Thus, if these two items are selected, it will not be possible to view both selections at once. Here the user is forced to remember what the other selections are, since they cannot be all viewed at the same time.
A typical user task involves scrolling information and selecting a number of objects or, items on which to perform an action. For example, the user may scroll a list of mail received and select individual mail items to print. Conventional user interface designs allow direct manipulation of a selected item to be interpreted as manipulating all selected items. Unfortunately, when scrolling to the end of a large list, unless the user has selected one of the items at the very end of the list to print, current systems require the user to scroll back to a selected item before direct manipulation can be used to print the selected items.
Also, in current implementations, the user does not know where the selected objects are when they have been scrolled out of sight. In order to review the selections the user must scroll slowly through the data until he or she finds the selected objects.